Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/11] QMP: Introduce specification file

From:

Jamie Lokier

Subject:

Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/11] QMP: Introduce specification file

Date:

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:05:39 +0100

User-agent:

Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11)

Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 06/24/2009 06:57 PM, Filip Navara wrote:
> >Given the fact that we practically have the library for XDR it would
> >be very easy to build Sun RPC server on top of it. So my vote is for
> >SunRPC.
> >
>
> My experience with SunRPC (NFS) has been pretty bad. It may have been
> due to implementation details, not to the spec itself, but it definitely
> left a bad taste in my mouth. Also, I don't see a SunRPC implementation
> for Python, which (along with similar languages) is an ideal platform
> for controlling qemu. I'd rather have something more modern.
SunRPC works, and it's fine if you always access it through utilities,
like say a C command-line client. Hiding the SunRPC aspect :-)
It's pretty fast too, so good for things like network filesystems.
But it's a real pain to use from scripts if you don't have a pre-built
utility which implements all application RPC functions already.
The basic problem is needing to create and compile C code - for all
clients as well as the server - each time an RPC function is added or
changed.
QEMU's monitor is already much easier to use than that.
When a new monitor command is added, you can use it from scripts as
trivial one-liner text commands, assuming you already have a way to
connect to the monitor.
-- Jamie